Ditransitives in three Gan dialects: valence-increasing and preposition incorporation

This paper studies ditransitive constructions in three Gan dialects, which are featured with the famous ‘inverted’ double object construction (DOC for short). It is schematized in the order of V-DO-IO. According to Zhang (2010), languages with inverted DOCs tend not to have GIVE verbs; instead of give, they use verbs like take, hold, and obtain in ditransitive constructions. Contra Zhang (2010), we argue that languages with inverted DOCs like Gan Chinese have typologically different GIVE verbs from their Mandarin counterpart: Mandarin has the R(ecipient) type of GIVE verbs, and Gan has the T(heme) type (cf. Margetts and Austin 2007). With synchronic cross-dialectal data, we attempt to figure out the relation between various ditransitive constructions in Gan. We argue that (i) ditransitives in Gan are often realized by the serial verb construction [GIVE-DO-Directional-IO], from which the inverted DOC is derived by deleting the directional element, and (ii) the T type of GIVE verbs can be shifted into the R type, as in the double GIVE construction [GIVE-DO-GIVE-IO] or in canonical DOC [GIVE-IO-DO]. This becomes possible only when GIVE absorbs the dative case.